Tag: Ayn Rand

Bob Iger’s ‘The Ride of a Lifetime’: Forget the social justice, just tell the story

I am not an anti-Bob Iger guy. As the head of Disney, I have been willing to forgive that he’s a liberal because I think he has done a pretty good job as a CEO in making that company one of the most powerful media companies in the world—arguably the biggest. Personally, I love Disney, but my interests often dwell in the challenges that corporations have in creative endeavors which obviously is a challenge the bigger a company gets. In that regard, Disney has been an interesting study and its not easy. After all, media is changing and its hard to get out in front of that change, and Iger has tried to do his best, and most of the time, he’s been right. However, with Star Wars he did blow it which I have talked about many different ways and I was very interested this week in reading his new book, ‘The Ride of a Lifetime’ that he admitted as best he could that he had some regrets about not following George Lucas’ story treatment for the latest trilogy. Clearly if Disney had handled that situation better, the Star Wars brand would not be as fractured as it is now. Iger took this opportunity in writing this book to throw the fans a bone and offer an apology which should take the edge off the activism for the upcoming The Rise of Skywalker film coming in December.

Iger’s book was good and insightful providing several examples of learning as he went along especially handling characters of great talent, like Steve Jobs and George Lucas in painting a picture of that very fine line in using massive corporate power to tell a story, when the best of what a story is comes from individual experience. Personally, after The Force Awakens came out, I was not happy and it took me a long time to give Star Wars a chance again. Largely for me it was that I had grandchildren who could use the stories the way I had shared them with my own kids. I raised my family on Star Wars so it seemed like a shame to throw everything out the window just because Bob Iger thought he needed to corporatize Star Wars to protect the brand. After all, from his point of view, Lucas was selling off the Star Wars property to let Disney take all the risk of making the next trilogy even if they might not be big billion dollar sellers at the box office the way that the market is lined up these days. Lucas thought he was selling Star Wars to a friend who would protect the brand for the long view. And the fans split along those lines. Now before the next film Bob Iger is doing just that, he’s reaching something of a compromise in getting back to the original Lucas vision, but it may be too late. Or maybe not. I’m willing to give it a chance for the reasons I mentioned. Because the upside is far too valuable.

I often talk about Star Wars as being more than just an entertainment franchise. Mythologically Star Wars is one of the hottest modes of storytelling that we have seen in all our human lifetimes. Even screwing up the canon storyline which takes place over thousands of years, Star Wars and the power of Disney and Lucasfilm before it, produces an enormous amount of cultural content, from books, television, video games, to of course the movies. The amount of material that there is from Star Wars has more of an impact on our culture than most religions and has far more power than governments over the minds of a population. And Star Wars is truly a global endeavor, no matter where in the world that you go, people know the brand and something about the stories. There are very few entertainment options that have that kind of power, so managing all that power is tricky business under even the best conditions. But at the heart of the Star Wars debate is the long desired human trait to understand free will, immortality, and the nature of spirituality. Even though the stories are kid’s stories, the questions they ask are quite large and have the tools to put minds on a higher place, exhibiting the best attributes of science fiction as a platform.

Iger’s mistake was that the very same skills that have made him a great CEO, that certain ruthlessness that you have to have to trust your own instincts are the same problems that caused him to second guess the Lucas story treatments which have now alienated fans. The Lucas story was set to take the characters that had been built through many decades of novels right into a philosophical story that might have been more like The Empire Strikes Back and less like a Star Wars greatest hits like The Force Awakens was. Iger had doubts that people would spend a billion dollars at the box office to explore the nature of the Whills and the concept of immortality within the universe. But in the end, because he held everything too tight, Disney killed the property anyway.

For me the interesting thing that Star Wars explores, that isn’t covered anywhere else in all earthly cultures is the very different approaches between oriental philosophies and the occident. Oriental obviously being collectivist in nature and the occident, focused on individual free will. The parts of Star Wars that works is the occidental part. The parts that people often don’t like even if they don’t consciously understand why is the oriental portions. However, the oriental aspects are important to the story telling so not every Star Wars story can be a billion-dollar grosser which is hard for a corporate spreadsheet to show to investors. But the study of the philosophy does drive merchandise sales for decades if done properly, and now ultimately Iger appears to understand that the Lucas vision should have been followed without his tampering.

Even for those not too interested in entertainment and pop culture aspects, the Bob Iger book is a good read and well worth the time. The selling of ideas is a tricky business after all. Speaking for myself my dealing with some of the people mentioned in Iger’s book left me wanting to live in exile just as Luke decided to do in both versions of the cannon, the extended universe and these Disney stories. And that is a challenge explored in the great book of philosophy called Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The problem remains and this is true of both Lucas and Steve Jobs who merged with Disney while he knew he was dying of cancer so that their companies could live—no matter how much liberal Hollywood types and creative geniuses want to talk about the independence of their craft and the superiority of ownership over corporate rule, ultimately the temptation to use big corporate engines to assume risk is where they always go wrong. Or is it really wrong? If Iger does make things right with fans I would argue that there are many more Star Wars story telling options for the future because of Disney ownership than without it. Many more books, more theme park tie ins, and many, many more visual mediums than if George Lucas had held onto the Star Wars brand. And with something with as much story to tell as Star Wars can tell Lucas was right to sell it to Disney. The mythology can explode so long as everyone understands the objective. And after reading the Iger book, I am sure he does. The question is, is it already too late? I certainly hope not. I’m rooting for him; I’d like to see everyone come out well in the end.

Rich Hoffman
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Corporations are Great: Star Wars, Disney and all the great things that come from making money

I personally love corporations, even though most of them function as socialist organizations. And it is difficult for a company like Disney to be creative as a result, as opposed to the early days when Walt Disney guided a much more capitalist enterprise. All large corporations have the same trouble when they become more socialist than capitalist for a lot of reasons which I am covering in my upcoming book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. But I couldn’t help but notice that the Star Wars problem and overall fan reaction to the new Black Spire Outpost in Disney World has an anti-corporation bias which goes completely against the nature of what many Star Wars fans stand for. Reading recently the Black Spire Outpost novel about the new Star Wars land the situation was obvious for which we see muddled in most of our understandings of corporate culture and everyone gets it wrong.

In the new version of Star Wars, the post Disney purchase, which I think they have gotten wrong, but more because of their own cultural limits than out of maliciousness the various factions of population are the Resistance, which many liberals directly attribute to our contemporary president of Donald Trump. The First Order, which is an authoritarian regime of micro controlling government which Tea Party types would associate with the Progressive Movement. Then there are the scum and villainy—the smugglers and bounty hunters who live outside the law always running from the law as space bound pirates roaming about freely, but often without a sense of family or home. I personally relate to this last faction, but in all three I see a kind of infantile understanding of human existence, however compared to other art forms, its much more sophisticated than any other entertainment option. For instance, I think the prequal films, especially Revenge of the Sith is a very sophisticated examination into how government can be a good entity one day, then the enemy of the people on the very next.

The problem Disney has is that they try to appeal to all the leftist types, the transgenders, the feminists, the socialist Democrats which all corporations can relate to, so to disguise their need to make money—which is the goal of all corporations. The problem is the dysfunctional relationship that corporations have with appeasement politics so that they can earn the right to do what they do, and that is to be a profit driven enterprise. The Disney problem with Star Wars is the same one that George Lucas could never deal with, that was to use the great money generated off of Star Wars and its merchandise to continue expanding the ability to create great mythology, because it takes money to tell these stories. So there is nothing shameful about turning a profit even though Disney and now Star Wars seems ashamed of it.

Out of those three factions the stories never deal with people’s need to make a living. The members of the Resistance don’t have jobs, they are given shelter and camaraderie for their efforts in fighting for the cause, but they aren’t out building families, buying starships or buying property. And that is the same for the First Order and the Empire that came before them. The members of the order are corporate in their design, but the individuals aren’t interested in buying houses and using their finances to gain prestige in the greater society. It is among the bounty hunters and smugglers that we can most relate because they are concerned about personal gain, which says a lot about a science fiction story because at least there is room for such contemplations.

In that way the Black Spire Outpost built by Disney is unique because the Resistance and First Order are present, but the town belongs to the pirates, criminals and smugglers who really make that galaxy an interesting place to visit. That’s interesting because even as a massive corporation who is out to make a lot of profit, and deserve to, Disney understands that at the heart of Star Wars is the every day people just trying to make a few bucks so they can live in the universe and if that is the baseline of understanding, then we can all build off it toward a mythic masterpiece that can mean a great deal to the customers.

In the book The Black Spire Outpost I enjoyed the corporate namedropping of all the things that can be done in the actual Disney Park, the names of the drinks you could buy in the cantina, the clothes and other souvenirs. There is nothing wrong with Disney selling merchandise and wanting to make money. The problem is, Disney has allowed for their own shaming by trying to appeal to leftist anti-capitalist groups to prove that they aren’t bad people, like many corporations are pushed into liberal causes to show that they aren’t big mean capitalists. However at the heart of what consumers want is those very traits and if the bottom line is so important, then Disney and all corporations should embrace capitalism publicly, and not hide their real desires behind masks of socialism. Its OK to want to make a profit and people don’t mind paying. But where the fears of corporate Disney ruining Star Wars reside is the real fear is in losing what the stories really meant to people. Nobody is interested in a bunch of altruistic self sacrificers. They want characters who are driven by the same needs they are in real life.

Only Disney and the incredible amount of money they can make could have built something like a real Black Spire Outpost and if it wasn’t profitable, they couldn’t do it. So for the benefit of everyone, we all need to drop the socialist perspective, which the Resistance certain is and the First Order and just admit that Star Wars as a property is all about making money then reinvesting that money into something good, like expanding the myth. Disney shouldn’t be shy about that and neither should their fans. I was talking to a person the other day who spent $800 in the Oga’s Cantina, which I understand completely. I mean where else could you sit down and have some exotic drinks to play Sabacc with the Millennium Falcon parked right outside? It takes money to build all that stuff and to maintain that reality to enjoy leisurely. If not for all the money that the Disney corporation has made, nothing at the Black Spire would be possible.

Corporations are not evil, making money is not wrong. But trying to adopt socialist ideas in the products that the corporation produces is bad because its not honest. And that’s when Disney gets scrutinized by its own fan base who have been told that the Resistance is all about being altruistic yet the company itself wants to make all the money it can. Well, yes, of course they are. We have allowed our society to criticize the very thing we enjoy most, we like to make money and we like to see companies become wealthy so they can create things we ultimately enjoy. The ideas of the Resistance and the First Order are not completely fleshed out ideas, but in the aspects of Star Wars that has received some of the best attention are the parts that involve the them of the Black Spire Outpost and that is a good sign for the future not just of Star Wars and Disney, but for corporations in general.

Rich Hoffman
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Monroe Schools Plays it Safe: One of the many reasons that Julie Shaffer has to go

I was very happy to learn that James Hahn, who is running for the Lakota school board is aligned with the Trump plan to allow concealed carry in the Lakota school district to stop potential threats to children at the point of danger. Lynda O’Connor is as well. If people who normally don’t vote in Lakota oriented elections within Butler County actually showed up to vote this November, there is the potential that this important program could be enacted at Lakota. However, as long as Julie Shaffer sits on the board, inaction and liberal policy making will continue, dangerously well into the future. Lakota like most districts without such a concealed carry policy will remain victims, and as the Monroe school system reminded us this past week, the danger is ever present.

Of course, the alternative to under preparation for moment to moment dangers is over reaction, and to their credit, Monroe schools in southwest Ohio has been very aggressive in monitoring social media accounts and cracking down on every little threat, which the Wednesday alarm turned out to be this past week. The alarm was real, but the threat wasn’t credible. Better to be safe than sorry. Yet a few years ago Monroe schools was accused of going to far digging into the text messages between students which led to the police isolating a young man and making an example out of him for a very minor commentary on his cell phone. For that the kid was suspended and had his cell phone confiscated by the police and was isolated within the student population for “security.” Better to ruin the reputation of one kid than to have a bunch of dead kids due to a rash of violence would be the reasoning. But that is what state controlled security looks like, they are watching everything we do even outside of the classroom, because that is where the roots of threats start and must be detected.

As all trained shooters know however is that the best way to deal with violence isn’t in suspending the liberty of all your students or voters, but in dealing with the problem when it occurs. Just doing the little things right, such as diligence on security check ins, following up on rumors with logic, and carrying guns for when and if a threat emerges so that it can be dealt with right then and there, not five to ten minutes later once the police arrive. That is after all the reason that our Constitution promotes private people carrying guns, so that the other aspects of the Constitution can be protected, such as unlawful searches and seizures.

Given the Monroe approach, which is keeping threats off the radar, but it’s always running all over privacy rights all in the name of safety, and that is the problem. Is that really what we want to teach our children, that their rights can be always superseded by the state need to protect them, when in fact they have a right and obligation to protect themselves? Of course, I would say not but this is a question for the general population. For most people safety is the limit of their concern, all they care about is whether or not their kids come home from school, and shallow thinking politicians will be happy to give them the minimum of their concern requirements. But at a cost, philosophically, and legally. Should the state take responsibility for safety or is it the task of each and every individual. Leave the math, the reading, and the history to the schools, but for the parents and school administrators, its their job to make sure things remain safe.

I’ve debated Julie Shaffer on WLW radio before, and in other forums and let me just say as politely as possible, that type of deep dive conversation is not within her intellect. She’s a pretty shallow stream, not very deep. For her, so long as Lakota, or any school system prevents mass shootings by intruding on the rights of the students and their parents, she’s fine with that, even if it does push kids into accepting that everything they do in life can fall under the purview of the state all in the name of safety and security. So long as something can be deemed “safe,” people like Shaffer can justify personal intrusion of the students. That is why she led the school board at Lakota to a stall out on the Trump initiative to arm teachers in the schools with concealed carry hoping to run out the clock on the inevitable act of violence that any district with 16,000 kids might embark on. Its safer to turn the responsibility over to the state and throw the rights of the students out the window. And when they grow up, they will then vote for the same policies because its all they know.

Lucky at Monroe this past week the threat wasn’t credible. But one of these days it will be, whether its there, or at Lakota, or some other big-name school in the famous southern Ohio districts outside of the I-275 loop. Its easier for shallow school board members to kick the can down the road and let someone else solve that problem for them even if it does step all over individual rights—because on the political left, that is the agenda anyway. At Lakota presently three of the five school board members are what we’d consider liberal, while the other two trends toward conservative. If James Hahn could find the votes from a sleepy public, that ratio could be turned around and this whole concept of safety and philosophy would have a chance to be heard. But not until a major change occurs.

Monroe, which is right next to Lakota as far as districts go has shown the trend of the future, monitor everything and at the slightest provocation, over-react. Play the better safe than sorry angle and hope you get to the bad guys before the bad guys get to you. But in the process, lots of innocent people are being scrutinized in ways that would have sent shudders up our spines just a few decades ago where nobody would ever think that such a day of personal intrusion would ever be acceptable. Just think of two more decades into the future where these kids will be running things, and what they will be willing to justify all in the name of safety.

Of course, the cause of the tendency toward violence is very much a current debate. I would say that we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg. Fatherless homes, failures of state care, a lack of personal responsibility where everyone gets a trophy, the legalization of marijuana, the over medication of depression medicine, the failure of religion, all just to name a few are contributing to the concept of violence against classmates that certainly wasn’t a consideration when I was in school. I would place the blame squarely at the feet of liberalism, which most of these school boards are functioning from, so we are mathematically inclined to get more of the bad behavior not less. That means we need to get our approach to this crisis faster than we are now. Kicking the can down the road doesn’t work when you run out of road, and I would say that’s where we find ourselves presently. And the demanded action will require more than a letter sent home to parents.

Rich Hoffman
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Seeing What’s Really There: Why Iran attacked Saudi oil fields and why we shouldn’t give a damn

One thing is very clear about liberal intellectual circles, and even conservative ones, they rely on the rules of society to disguise what they cannot see about life. They are blind as bats without the sonar to navigate a dark cave on a black, moonless night. So, it should not be surprising that they have no idea what to make out of the sudden Iranian attack on Saudi Arabian crude oil facilities launched from within Iran sending cruise missiles into their targets knocking out 5% of the oil production for the world. Obviously, Iran is struggling under the U.S. sanctions and they hope by taking their competitor down a notch or two that they might survive on the world marketplace just a bit longer. Having friends like Russia, North Korea and even China doesn’t mean much these days so all the old Marxist regimes are struggling to find their way in the world of capitalist markets. All they can do is lash out as Iran did.

For those who can’t see clearly what the situation is, the Iranian revolution during the 70s was a Marxist incursion meant to spread socialism and communism all over the Middle East to control the oil fields. Communist policy makers in the United States trained at our best colleges and sent forth to do the bidding of evil over regulated the oil industry in America so that Iran and the Middle East in general could leverage the world and its capitalism through high prices on barrels of oil which is essentially an attack on every one of us and our cars. This game went on all through the past decades as America was pulled into war after war to protect those interests and even when Iran was losing, they were winning because of their Marxist intentions, which was why the Obama administration was trying to help Iran along, to keep that machine running for the cause.

But Americans aren’t stupid, they voted for Trump, he deregulated the industry and that has made America for the first time in our history oil independent and has driven down through competition the prices on a barrel of oil. That has also given us leverage to sanction Iran for bad behavior because we don’t need their oil. In pain, economically since most of the vision of the typical Iranian is regional, they blame Saudi Arabia for that leverage, because they haven’t yet accepted that America can produce its own oil. So they attacked the crude oil facilities to get themselves at a seat at the negotiating table.

It has been a complete myth for intelligentsia to assume that America went around the world controlling territories out of imperialism, or simply so that we could have cheap oil for our cars. Every person who says such a thing is lost as to the real cause of what makes what and who the good guys are in the world. America stands for the creative potential of capitalism and freeing oppressed people who have been living under tyrannical leadership for all of their history. Socialism is all about centralized authority which limits human creativity and freedom, which is why China must steal intellectual information from their competitors just to stay relevant in the marketplace, because imagination and development do not happen when human minds are constrained to regulation.

America had an obligation to stand behind capitalism in the East and in the Middle East as well as Central America because it was an attack on the progress that could be made under that political philosophy. There are of course nuances between Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Karl Marx’ Communist Manifesto but our human development has brought us to a place where we can’t have both. The problem is most people can’t tell the difference. They have been taught in their public educations and their government that socialism is the path of the future, but logic and business say that capitalism is the only means of real advancement. The two aren’t compatible. For many years the United States did go around the world trying to put out every little Marxist revolution to keep markets open and as free as possible, not just for ourselves, but for the benefit of the world that didn’t always appreciate it. But the real villains were within the American government where they set policies to push America beyond its borders and into that imperialist accusation that the liberal pinheads like to talk about all the time.

As a wealthy guy who knows how the game is played President Trump didn’t need a fancy room of advisors to tell him that the way to beat everyone at the oil table was to make ourselves independent. He just did it and now even if nobody sells oil to the United States, we can make our own. That has put all these tyrants at a severe disadvantage and taken away all their leverage—particularly Iran. Even by knocking out Saudi Arabian oil fields, the American economy will not be stifled and that is the big picture as to what happened as a result of this attack by Iran.

Should the United States get involved in the conflict and protect Saudi Arabia, well, no. Its true, we have been selling arms to Saudi Arabia to defend itself. They can defend themselves. The people who don’t see so well, the television pundits and cable news producers will want to tell dramatic stories about how barrels of oil will go up as a result, but the truth is, America doesn’t need their oil. We have our own. And that is a pretty good place to be. There is no reason to attack Iran. They are already on the brink of annihilation due to their commitment to Marxist ideology for which they needed to have domination over the oil market for it to work. The moment that America took that leverage away, Iran as a powerhouse of world affairs ended. It’s just taking a while for the rest of the world, the blind people, to catch up.

There is nothing for America to do about Iran, or Saudi Arabia. We can sell more weapons to the Saudi’s to help them defend themselves, but there is no reason to put boots on the ground in any fashion. The Iranians are lashing out with everything they have left trying hard to excerpt force to bring people to the negotiating table. But there is nothing for them to barter with. The problem that leftists used against America was the anti-imperialist angle that always put capitalism in a bad light, because American leaders just didn’t know how to defend it. They’d provoke America into action then blame them for overreaching in corners of the world over indigenous people who were quietly being recruited into socialism and communism. But you can’t call America an imperialist if they get their own oil out of Texas and Ohio and stay out of wars in the Middle East. We can just make our own. They can fight it out all they want. And that is why this new game is so much better than the old one. And why finally America can win, because the villains are all now exposed and standing behind barrels of oil that nobody really needs or cares about.

Rich Hoffman

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Beto O’Rourk’s Gun Buyback Tyranny: Walmart should be ashamed of themselves

The skateboard riding marijuana supporting Beto O’Rourke advocated for increased criminal conduct recently when he announced his desire to promote a federal buyback program for guns. That would be after all the result of any buyback program advocated by the federal government to seize control of 300 million guns in America. Criminals looking for quick cash to support their drug habits and other scandalous enterprises would simply break into homes and steal all they could get their hands on so they could turn in the guns no questions asked, as other liberalized countries around the world have done. Only those places weren’t America and the love for their guns not nearly as intense. For Beto and all the other gun grabbers running for president, gun confiscation is the name of the game, even if it unleashes a criminal element that we all consider undesirable. They don’t care about any of that so long as they get what they want, more centralized authority and more public demand for daddy government to protect everyone with them leading the charge as Democrats.

Did you hear that I am suing the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for branding the NRA a “domestic terrorist organization.” I’m not personally suing, but through my proud membership, and those of another 5 million Americans, we are. And we should. Something that is constitutional and protected by the Bill of Rights, such as gun ownership for the purpose of changing a corrupt government if needed is not a terrorist organization, and it is all the signs of a government getting out of control that would even try to establish that NRA members are “domestic terrorists.” The opposite is true, and anybody trying to do such a thing to good people have trouble coming. Big trouble. For most of those 300 million guns, nobody gets killed and good conduct is expected among the owners. It is those who are suffering under failed Democrat policies, such as the poor people of South Chicago, who use guns in a bad way. It is not a proper reflection of a gun culture as America is.

Shame on Walmart for caving into these sorry excuses for human beings, the gun grabbers who don’t take cause and effect into their considerations, such as the presentation of a gun buyback program. I’m not generally one who calls for boycotts, but I would think we should all use other options for our shopping experience. Walmart should have stood behind the concept of Americanism, which requires guns to keep it going, instead of taking a stand against it. The idea of how to regulate the intentions of the wicked and corrupt in a free society is to expand government and hope that the police can come within 10 minutes to a crime is simply preposterous. Ownership of the gun is the same concept of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” that states that self-interest will drive the economy, not government regulation. To have free flowing commerce, people must be able to defend property rights at the point of resolution, not some court date set a year after, or a police force that is always boarding on corruption because of the amount of power we give them.

Do you ever look at a highway at 2 AM and wonder where all those people are going? So many people independently thinking about going somewhere and without talking to all the rest of the highway travelers are out at all hours of the night doing whatever they do. Most are going on trips, or going to work, or just going out for a drive. Some are up to no good, but all are independently contributing to commerce and the invisible hand of Adam Smith’s economy. The world of people like Beto O’Rourke or any Democrat for that matter would be that those people would stay home under a curfew and live within the parameters of their rules and tight regulations. Sure, they’ll let you smoke pot so that you are too drugged to see what they are doing to you, but what they want to do is regulate everything, starting with guns. Once they convince people to give up their guns, they intend to attack that free commerce using the ever-present safety need to drive society toward less and less freedom. Once they convince people that guns are dangerous, they can then convince them that capitalism is dangerous. That it is dangerous to travel at night un-supervised, and that we must elect more of “them” to keep us all safe.

I would argue that it was liberal talking points that spawned the drugged mass shooters into action and provoked them to kill. The utterances of Beto O’Rourke and Elizabeth Warren certainly had an impact on the mind of the Dayton shooter recently who made his choices knowing it would spawn gun control debate. Conner Betts was a gun control advocate and under the influence of drugs and liberalized thinking when he used a .223 100 round drum magazine to conduct his “domestic terrorism.” It’s never NRA members doing these things, it’s the drug addicts and those otherwise victimized by liberalized thinking who do. Then once the act is done, those same people look to legislators and say, “see, something must be done.” That’s like some loser farting in a room then complaining that people shouldn’t smell up such a tight space with body gas.

So then we are supposed to just accept that these same people are trying to spread more violence with gun buybacks by encouraging more criminals to hit the streets and rob our houses so they can get their hands on free government cash. Then defenseless, we will all turn to more government for safety and protection. The cycle is endless, and intentional, and is as anti-American as anything ever proposed on the North American continent. We don’t care what Australia, or New Zealand have done, we don’t care about Switzerland, Sweden, or China. American’s want their freedom and they need their guns to have it. Calling the NRA a terrorist organization and to encourage government buybacks are the aggressive tactics of “domestic violence,” and it’s time we call it that.

I would encourage you dear reader to join the NRA if you have not already. Sure, 5 million members is a lot, but it should be more like 20 million. It costs a lot of money to fight these thugs in court and we need to be doing more of it. For every San Francisco Board of Supervisors there are countless others wanting to do the same thing and I propose that “we” the NRA go after them all before they strike at us, because if left alone, they will. The enemy is agenda driven and they want communism like what China has in the United States and to get there, they must have people stoned on drugs and unarmed. They must kill the young before they ever get their first Red Ryder BB gun, so that they can’t grow up to defend the American Constitution. It has always been a war and the guilty are always the gun grabbers who help cause the incidents of violence that sometimes occur, then use them to try to turn public sentiment into gun confiscation. And if a gun buyback creates more crime, that’s just fine with them. Because it’s not your safety and security that they want, it’s your guns so that you’ll have no way to protect yourself from them. And that is the name of the game.

Rich Hoffman

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I’ll Take The Art of the Deal over The Art of War: China has already lost the trade war

You can go back a long ways, even to the time where Doc Thompson and I talked about the China problem on WLW radio frequently. You can Google me or him on the topic of China and discover that this issue is not a new one. Long before there was a President Trump, people like us were trying to wake people up to the fact that modern warfare was not in tanks, guns and troops, it was economies and China was seeking to knock America off the ladder and to become the dominate player in the world as a communist country of everything financial. And they almost got away with it. I would vote for Donald Trump again, and again, and again if only to get out of his entire presidency this one thing, taking on China and halting the incursion into our lives that was well at play before his election. What people don’t seem to realize is that China was sucking out of the American economy over $500 billion per year in trade deficits. When we talk about the United States operating at a trillion dollars per year deficit, that is where half the money is going. If Trump hadn’t come along when he did, we’d all be in big trouble right now, Obama and Bush were all in on the deal. China was going to rule the world as a communist power, and even members of our own government were seeking to make it happen.

I was pretty furious that the public school in my home district of Lakota was sending teachers to China in exchange programs intent to learn how we could be more like them, because as an education institution, it should have been the other way around. I was even more furious when visiting the Children’s Museum in Indianapolis that they had an entire exhibit dedicated to learning about the Chinese way of doing things, as if preparing American students for the inevitable takeover. The United States was poised by a lot of dumb politicians prior to President Trump to give away American wealth to the Chinese and they were going to be handed the keys to the world just for showing up as a global communist power that leftist economists wanted to breathe to being since the same experiment in Russia, and Vietnam had failed.

China was never as powerful as authorities told us. As a communist tyranny their society naturally lacks imagination and deep philosophic thinking, and that is clear in their culture, as it is in every communist society. That is not a political statement, it’s a human one. It doesn’t matter if the subject is the sad housewife who spent her entire life serving her family only to see them all grow up and away giving her little back in return or the business professional that has poured their entire life into their company serving their bosses then dying one year after retirement, people are happiest when they are free to act and think what they want when they want to. Capitalism allows for more of this behavior than centralized controlled societies. That society may be the contents of a marriage between two people where one clearly dominates the other, and the other is a miserable wreck of a person, or a company and its employees, where top down authority is more important than horizontal harmony. China as a power is too centralized for their billion plus people to think for themselves. They have the workers, but they don’t think freely which is a huge impediment to an expanding economy built off wealth production.

The whole trick worked so long as America could be coaxed into giving away their wealth so that China could have it. So long as America followed green agenda points with over regulation while China could do anything to the environment and nobody would say anything—especially the climate science activists who secretly knew the name of the game was and will always be for them, global communism. They want a welfare state so they can sit around collecting a government check while their lazy asses play video games all day, and they vote accordingly. But they do not represent the intellect of America, that’s why we voted for Trump. To avoid this downward spiral.

Its time to say all this because this issue as I said has been around a long time. My friend Doc Thompson was recently killed by an Amtrack train, which I still find uncharacteristically odd, but whatever. He’s not around any more, but this China problem is exactly as he and I said it would be nearly ten years ago. And I for one am extremely happy with how President Trump is playing the situation for American advantage. The Chinese are exposed. The American economy will start to see plus revenue as the money flows out of China and back into the United States. That isn’t to say that we don’t have to solve our spending problem in America, but Trump isn’t president to do that. He’s there to put money back in the jar. We’ll fight later about how to spend it. His job is to stop the bleeding and he is certainly doing that.

There are a few YouTube videos confirming what I’m saying, and a few business analysist types on cable news who agree with me, but I have found it shocking that with all the great intellect that we have in America that more people just don’t understand the problem with China and what they have been up to. However, I did spend about ten years of my life reading The Art of War not just in the words that were printed on the page, but in soaking up their meaning in the way that the Chinese think. The book itself dates back to around 500 BC to the Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu and clearly that has been the way that the Chinese not only came to power after World War II where America did all the fighting for them only to lose the entire East to communism, in Korea and Vietnam. Was it on purpose, I think so. Our government wanted communism in the East and it looks now that FDR and his partners in government wanted communism, not to hinder it. One of the people I most admire in the world was Claire Lee Chennault, the leader of the Flying Tigers who was tasked with defending China from the Japanese. After reading his book, the Way of the Fighter its clear to me that the United States military only wanted him to preserve China for the obvious communist invasion coming out of the Soviet Union. People disliked Ronald Reagan for standing up to Russia in the same way that they hate Trump for standing up to China, because they wanted communism to rule the world, and that has always been the fight. Its not new, but is to those who don’t read books, and haven’t been screaming about this issue from the rooftops on national radio shows for years, or writing about it as extensively, and solitarily, as I have.

For a change America has its own book on strategy, The Art of the Deal and the author of that book is the guy in the White House. The Chinese wish they had back Sun Tzu but all they can do is read his words. For America, the sequel to The Art of the Deal is applying those tactics to real life as we speak, and the result will be an end to Chinese communism. Trump knows that the financial status of China is all paper tigers and shadows on the wall made to look bigger than they really are. The reality is that they are going to collapse the longer they fight, and that is why these protests in Hong Kong are happening now. The people there know that this is their best shot at freedom so they are taking it. And I am so proud to have Trump in the White House fighting this fight even though many of the people around him in Washington D.C. are cheering on the Chinese. Their betrayal tells us who they were all along.

Rich Hoffman

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The Latest Mass Shooter Seth Ator: Where liberalism has failed, they always call for gun control

It took nearly 24 hours after another gunman identified the 36 years old Texan Seth Ator as the Odessa mass shooter which led to many conspiracy theories right after the tragedy. What was different from this event was that the killer was pulled over by police and shot at as they approached his vehicle. It wasn’t necessarily a preplanned massacre as others have been, while using an AR platformed weapon to invoke mass destruction on innocent people. This time the guy was just doing his thing and when he was engaged by law enforcement that broke up whatever activity he was doing, it set him off into a volatile rage that turned deadly quick.

It was sad that immediately after there were already calls for gun control, and this time it was a bit different also. Anti-gun people revealed more what their intentions were, since it was obvious that Seth Ator had a bit of a criminal record. Just like with health care it was the Obama part of it that was sold with the intention of going to a public option and complete socialist takeover. Well, the red flag laws that have been proposed, as well as the background checks are just the beginning. Gun grabbers and solid political leftists want guns removed from society. They quickly were using this case as one where open carry wouldn’t have worked, and tried immediately to apply the shooters “white guy” status to support their attempts at gun control. Its all been part of their overall story, angry white guys are dangerous, racist and that they created America and all that needs to be erased from history. But to do that, of course they have to take away the guns because that’s what keeps such a rebellion from happening.

However, as I have said, and from what we know is directly applicable to this case, failed parental structures are what is causing these mass shootings, the values these kids are not getting in their families is far more destructive than any other element. Then as has been the case with every shooter lately, we are still learning about this one, but drugs both legal and illegal have played a part in altering the consciousness of the attackers. All those elements are foundations of liberal policy in the failed experiments of replacing the family with government and the results are exploding on our streets now that many of the basic foundations of proper behavior have been eroded away into this anarchy movement that we see everywhere these days.

There were early reports that this guy was on meth and was an Antifa member which I stated wouldn’t have surprised me at all. To be honest, at 36 he’s a little old for Antifa terrorism, but it would be closer to a reality than to say he was a good Christian kid from Odessa that just freaked out one day and killed a bunch of people at a traffic stop. Liberals want to remove guns from our society because they have made kids like this killer with their social policies and they are determined to use every tragedy that occurs to attack America’s gun culture, and they truly expect everyone to just take it, and go along with implied guilt for things they had nothing to do with. But the left did. As is typical of all these recent shooters, Ator came from a divorced home. While divorce has been around for a while, it only became common in our society over the last few decades. There was a stigma against it in the 70s and 80s. If a woman became pregnant prior to that period, you got married and you forced yourself to live happily ever after so that you could grow a family. And when you got older and couldn’t stand each other anymore, you still stayed married because it was the right thing to do for the kids. Because kids psychologically need parental structure, no matter how much they rebel. They need the structure of a father and a mother, and when that is replaced with something else, such as a government welfare check, a student loan program, or any form of handout that replaces a father as head of a family, we see trouble in the products of that family, the children.

Not that every young person who has a dad that lives across town and must watch their parents date other people and spend Thanksgivings with their new boyfriends and girlfriends, they don’t go out and shoot a bunch of people just for the hell of it. But it is a problem among a large portion of our population, just as heavy marijuana use is an indicator of psychotic behavior in a minority of their users. Not everyone who smokes pot becomes a killer just as not everyone growing up without a dad does, but it is certainly an indicator of future violent behavior.

I will be the first to say that the kind of world I want to live in, where we openly carry our guns, everywhere, that such a society would require the best of what our culture could produce. People in such a society would be well educated, would not abuse drugs and alcohol, and would come from solid families with loving backgrounds. The only reason we don’t have such a society is because left leaning activists want all the bad things, broken families, reckless—inconsequential sex, drug abuse, and an ignorant population. And to have those things, they don’t want guns so everyone can kill each other. They want the deviant behavior and they don’t want consequences. That is the real issue and no law proposed could fix that.

The anti-police stance of Antifa likely did have more to do with Seth Ator opening fire on the police as they approached his vehicle after a traffic stop. The solution for the political left is to take away all guns so that Seth Ator wouldn’t have had the opportunity to do such a thing. But of course the ignorance of that proposal is that it does nothing to correct the desire to shoot a cop in the first place. After the initial attack against the police, Ator drove around killing random people, but there clearly wasn’t a plan. It was behavior driven and the elements that created that behavior that was the real cause. If it wasn’t guns, it would have been something else. Killers and lunatics will use anything to invoke a menace on a population if they are unhappy, which is why guns are needed to keep such things from getting out of control. In an open carry environment, he would have been shot by a good guy with a gun sooner, but this was different because he was in a car driving around before people could really get a sense of what was going on.

Without question these shootings are more political than demanding a legal mandate because no law proposed, background checks, red flag laws, or even illegal drug enforcement will change these occurrences. They are the results of liberalism injected into an otherwise conservative society and the conflict that is the natural biproduct. At the very least in this case was the lack of a biological family that was stable and secure. Mom and dad were divorced, and some people just can’t handle that. Their anger may project outward to innocent members of society, but the root cause is the broken family and the disappointments of a child that was robbed of that basic security. We would do better to make divorce illegal than guns. But to admit such a thing, liberals would have to admit that their social experiment of removing dads from homes and attacking the core values of American life has been a failure. And they certainly won’t do that. They’d rather blame guns.

Rich Hoffman

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I Love Being Right: James Comey should go to jail

Not to brag or anything, some people are good at certain things. Some people can throw a football downfield accurately and under pressure, some people can dance on their toes and appear light as a feather, and some people are great at math. We all have our things that we are good at, and some of us work hard throughout our lives to become better at more things. For me, my thing has always been the ability to break down people upon meeting them for a short time, and to structure conditions based on that relationship. I can tell most of what I need to know about people within a few minutes of talking to them, and it is with a great amount of pride that I figured out James Comey very fast. Due to the nature of this recent Inspector General report from the Department of Justice I am enjoying more of the “I told you so’s” because it implicates James Comey, the former director of the FBI as a liar and cheat who was an activist against an incoming president of the United States and grossly abused his power to instigate the overthrow of an election. Then tried to blame it on the Russians. Thinking back just three years ago I was particularly proud of myself for my comments on CNN during Anderson Cooper’s show when I stated on air that Comey had lied during his testimony and should go to jail.

Of course, for television I didn’t want to be that hard on him even though the host wanted me to say so much. At the time even considering such a thing was extremely scandalous and we had only had Donald Trump as president for a few months. We really hadn’t had a chance to see Trump operate under pressure and all we knew about Comey was that he was projected as an honorable man. But I watched his testimony with the CNN crew the entire time and my thoughts about the guy afterwards wasn’t that it implicated Trump, but that it did the entire FBI, and at that moment, nobody was ready to accept that thought.

CNN had brought a bunch of Trump supporters, me included, to Rick’s Tavern in Fairfield, Ohio to watch the entire event as it unfolded on live television then to get our reaction to see if our support would wane for Trump. It was quite shocking to the CNN crew afterwards that none of us had pulled our support for Trump and that some of us, like me, were convinced that Comey was guilty of some bad crimes. The behind the scenes talk that day made me feel a little bad about it because the thought at the time was that such a consideration was so outlandish that it was in the realm of tin foil hatted conspiracy theory. Yet I am pretty good at these things, so I said what I did on television anyway and it was painful at first, because a lot of people saw it. But I had to stand by what I thought, and as it turned out, I was more than correct.

And it goes to say that I was right about all the others too, that the Justice Department was covering for the Clinton family and their many crimes. That like the Epstein scandal the private server had a lot of embarrassing information on it which is why Hillary had it to begin with. The FBI certainly didn’t want all that information out. They did their part to create the illusion of a republic while all the while steering our government toward a Democrat run dictatorship that would eventually melt into the United Nations as a governing body. All that was in place and people like James Comey felt that helping those things along was part of his “higher calling.”

I hate to say it but once you’ve known them in some form or another you’ve known them all. I know the kind of parties that James Comey and his wife went to in the back yards of their expensive government paid for homes with friends and neighbors, all of whom were connoisseurs of wines and fashion, and who planned long couples vacations to Europe for shopping trips in Paris and Venice just for the hell of it. They could tell you the vintage of an exotic wine with their pinky held out, but couldn’t tell anybody much about the names of gunfighters popular during western expansion, because to them that part of American history was to be erased and reset to a new world order. Comey thought that attribute honorable, the destruction of America into a global order, so lying about it was not a problem. It was considered to him collateral damage. Of course, the White House ran by Obama knew about all this, they are the ones who provoked it. And the arrogance in getting caught you can see now that they are no different from typical unionized activist caught by their employers for doing something wrong. For Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok to think about suing the FBI for wrongful termination, and Comey for insisting that he is owed an apology is just another page out of the union playbook for disgruntled, and spoiled workers who have lost touch with reality. That playbook states that when guilty, attack to keep the investigation off the details, just as in football when the other team blitzes, you throw the ball down field because someone will be open. Only in this game we are finally on to it, and these guys are guilty of some very bad things, domestic terrorism at the very least.

I am used to playing poker with these thoughts of mine simply because the audience that hears them isn’t always ready for the truth. The truth is the truth, but there is power in controlling the way that people come to it which is far more powerful than any concealed carry permit. Knowing things about people and understanding how to use that power is very helpful as a skill, so I don’t always blurt out what I am up to. That would be stupid. But it is good to say something so controversial on television so far ahead of the truth and to rub people’s noses in it a bit. It’s very “satisfying.” Of course, there are many ways to speak the truth, you don’t always want to blurt out in raw form what you think. Sometimes you do, it depends on the circumstance. But on a big national issue where at the time nobody felt comfortable in agreeing with me, the report from the IG was very satisfying. Now I would encourage you dear reader to continue reading what I have said with this understanding and to prepare your life accordingly. Because a country where the President ran by Obama thought it could use the levers of power in the way it did to overthrow the Trump election is a country already too far gone to ignore. We can’t just trust elections anymore, we must consider everything is against us, and to be vigilant. It may take more than just electing Trump to set things right. And that is a hard truth we all must face.

 

Rich Hoffman
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Its all about Branding: Trump Doesn’t Need Fox News

Of course, the rules are the same for every local candidate as it is in presidential elections, a public official like Donald Trump has a right to protect their brand, for it was their brand that we voted for and continue to support. When that brand is attacked, a public official has a right to protect it. Like most businesspeople, President Trump understands his brand and has done a great job over the years of building it, so it is with no small concern that he would seek to lash out at those trying to destroy his brand. Yes, he has a right to allow his supporters in the White House to dig up dirt from The New York Times reporters who have been activists against him and to seek to destroy them. Why not? And in the great relationship between Trump and Fox News, if the cable news station wavers, as it has under new leadership post Roger Ailes, then yes, Trump has a right to go after them. This nonsense about “journalistic integrity” is a lot of garbage. There is no integrity in the news business, especially in corporate media. It’s all entertainment based and designed toward ratings and for that, they should be very grateful toward the Trump brand.

It was embarrassing to listen to Brit Hume sound off about how Fox News does not work for the president, especially after Trump has given unfettered access to Fox News over the last four years or so. He’s been around long enough to know the game and he comes across sounding like an idiot. To consider that Fox News or anybody in journalism is “protecting” the public with a free and open press is foolish, and for people not to be upset about attacking Trump’s brand when that is what they voted for is disingenuous. I’ve never liked the part of Fox News that has Brit Hume in it, or Juan Williams, the disgraced NPR personality who was brought to Fox by people like Bill O’Reilly out of fairness and friendship. With Ailes out and O’Reilly out and the hiring of Donna Brazile there are obvious signs that the network is turning to the left because they think that’s where the future audience is. But it isn’t.

I never enjoyed the commentary of Charles Krauthammer for that matter when he would appear on Bret Baier. I have watched Fox News because they cover more that concerns me than other stations, but they aren’t nearly conservative enough for me. I would sit through the Krauthammer segments cringing at his institutional diatribes and do something else until he was done. Fox would claim itself to be fair and balanced, and I think that is generally true, but what they have been doing lately under the guidance of their new CEO Suzanne Scott is a sharp turn toward progressivism. And that isn’t much different from before, during the O’Reilly days where Fox News started the horse race with Hillary Clinton two years before the election. They wanted to tell the story of the Democrats and they have been soft on them even when crimes were committed. I would never say that Fox was a hard-hitting news organization. They just didn’t do as bad as the rest of them.

Where was the coverage of the Epstein molestations ten years ago when it mattered, when news outlets like Alex Jones were reporting what was going on and who was involved. Today Jones is de-platformed, you can’t watch his shows except on his website while outlets like Fox and CNN continue to be the dominate forces in news. But look at what they’ve gotten wrong, or rather, what they haven’t covered that has contributed to so much evil. If they really wanted to be fair and balanced, and unafraid, they would have not covered the Epstein rapes and connections to Bill Clinton conspiracy theories but would have followed the evidence to the real villains.

The same could be said of the FBI scandal where the attempt to overturn the Trump election was pushed to small segments and very little activism. We’re talking about a story bigger than Watergate, but nobody wants to touch it, essentially because most of the corporate news world is in on the action in some form or another, either from ties to government leakers or the Washington parties that are hard to get invites to. Fox News lets Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson do their rants on television, and they turn loose a few reporters to dig up the stories because it does feed the Trump base which is a huge part of the Fox News audience, but they never drive the story to a conclusion that would otherwise force resignations or public outcry. They do enough reporting to get people to have an emotional response, but not enough to cause change, so Brit Hume isn’t checking the powerful and holding them accountable. Fox News is just pointing things out and letting them drift into history the next day.

So, what right do they have to attack Donald Trump’s brand, but not to have him and his people shoot back? Why would anybody in the media think such a thing was viable, or even acceptable? Then for others to warn Trump not to upset Fox News because they might not cover his rallies and other events giving him a platform to the public. To suggest such a thing is to propose that it was the media that made Trump. But what nobody is talking about is that it was Trump’s brand that made Fox. Does anybody know what happened to Megan Kelly? She locked horns with the Trump brand and where did that get her? Out.

I wouldn’t say that it is just Trump’s brand, it could be anybody who has worked hard to build their name. They may use media to get there, but it isn’t the media that makes them, they are simply the benefactors of good television drama. They don’t make or break people the way that media operators want to believe. They need the brand of the dynamic in order to put content on their stations and that is the secret they don’t want anybody to know. But Trump understands it, and so do his supporters.

These same rules apply to the local press, wherever in the country you may live dear reader. They are all pretty much the same. They need you more than you need them. In this day and age where there are so many more options to get your name out and to build up your brand, you don’t need Fox News, or even NBC News. You don’t need to suck up to the Disney network of ABC and whisper in the ear of the local newspaper reporters, because nobody reads them anymore, because the content is boring. But they do need you, and Fox needs Trump. Trump doesn’t need Fox. That is the way the game goes and its time everyone realizes it. Especially that media. They are not the makers of the world and those who keep it in check. Rather, it is the branding of politicians that do the most good, because they do have to protect their brand, and that keeps them honest. Not the reporter or their networks. Sorry Brit Hume, but you aren’t very relevant to the scheme of things. And more and more, you are just a boring addition to a network that has added more boring people, not gotten better over time.

Rich Hoffman
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D23 and Star Wars: Liberal ideas are rejected everywhere, especially in a galaxy far, far away

It’s important because it involves so many parts of our culture, but as I occasionally do write about Star Wars it is interesting to watch as how its meaning has changed for people over time. Personally, when people ask me how I’m able to do so much on such a range of things, it’s because I use mythology to grasp concepts so that there is room for ideas to be conceived and to grow. I would compare it to a bowl to hold something like popcorn in, the bigger the bowl, the more ideas you can hold. Mythology is how the human race holds ideas that it can then grasp and work with, and the bigger the ideas, the better functioning the society. In a lot of ways young people have more than ever lots of vehicles to invest ideas into, not just the movies that we all grew up on, but video games, a lot of literature, and all the streaming services that are available such as Amazon Prime and Netflix. And to make those streaming services flourish there has to be a lot of content and Hollywood, as I have been saying for years, is struggling to produce. We live in one of the most creative times in human history, but we have more than ever also witnessed how liberalism in general in a culture of mass competition for ideas shows the trends of society and nothing more vividly displays that trend like Star Wars, because it is at least a cultural measure that everyone can pretty much agree is a standard mythology of our culture. Not everyone likes it, but it manages to touch most people in some way or another making a great platform for analysis.

So to catch everyone up on where Star Wars is, there is a movie coming out this December, it’s the last film of the nine part series that has been going on for 40 years. It’s an important key to whether or not Star Wars survives into the future because as of now, it only has nostalgic value. Young people don’t necessarily like it on its own, its more something that they can share with their parents and grandparents, so the brand is struggling. Watching all the D23 news from Disney over this past weekend there is a lot to look forward to from arguably the largest media company in the world. But the evidence that as a very progressive company that has lost their way into making new and fresh ideas is obvious. Disney as a company is living off their legacy properties and what they’ve done many years ago, not what they have been able to do lately. With the exception of the Marvel movies, there hasn’t been anything fresh from Disney for years as they have taken for granted that people will buy into their products even though they are spewing with progressive political causes, such as race diversity, sex issues such as feminism, and elements of gay rights that most people just aren’t comfortable with. Disney as a company has tried to hide their massive appetite for capitalism behind progressive causes and it has hurt them tremendously—because they weren’t honest about it. They would have been better off to proclaim that they are happy to make money and not ashamed of it one bit instead of trying to sell themselves off as progressive activists laboring for every liberal cause known to mankind. Not so much at the stock exchange rate yet, but that is coming just as I stated years ago after the first new age Star Wars film came out, that Disney has really screwed up the multi billion dollar franchise leaving them desperate to fix it, which is what they are promising to do on several fronts starting with the new film coming out this December in addition to several live action television shows coming to their new streaming service, such as The Mandalorian, and a new show just about Obi-Wan Kenobi played by Ewen McGregor which fans have wanted for over 20 years.

Star Wars, especially the best parts of it such as the cantina scenes where Obi-Wan cuts off the arm of an assailant in A New Hope, then shortly thereafter Han Solo kills the bounty hunter Greedo in a blaze of gun fire, these modern progressive filmmakers thought that what they had made with Star Wars could be that bowl I was talking about that could hold lots of ideas including copious amounts of progressive sentiment. Even with the billions of dollars that Disney has put into Star Wars the fans have responded flat which was most notable with the most recent Star Wars movie, which I loved, Solo: A Star Wars Story. After The Last Jedi, which I enjoyed, fans had shown they had enough of Disney tampering with something they loved and they were rejecting the Disneyification of Star Wars outright, and not buying the toys, and merchandise at the levels that Disney needed them to in order to justify their investment. This has been obvious now that the big Star Wars lands that have opened in California and now in Disney World in Orlando and people aren’t that interested. I warned everyone way back in 2015 on radio and several articles, that the key to the franchise wasn’t Luke Skywalker, it was Han Solo, the space cowboy that reflected the American values of Ayn Rand and John Wayne, which has always been at the heart of Star Wars. Star Wars for people is best when it has those elements, not actors that were cast because they were Latino, or because they were women—but because the characters were good and the actors fit the part. When Disney essentially killed off the angry white guy characters and failed to replace them with new ones, they lost their audience. The Last Jedi was essentially a movie where all the white men were killed and the crazy progressive women were all in charge and people, real people who are out there voting for Donald Trump don’t want to see movies and stories about that kind of topic, and it has really hurt the Star Wars brand.

But I am encouraged, this year at D23 Disney is showing that they can take their money and do great things with it. I am rooting for them to get it right, I want their Star Wars Land of Galaxy’s Edge to be successful, I want to see Star Wars make a strong comeback for that next generation because it is still one of the best things out there to take our culture from where it was to where it needs to go in science and thought. There is room for big ideas in Star Wars, which is what I use it for as a mythology. It’s a big story with lots of bold concepts, but at its heart it was and continues to be a space western. So long as that formula is stuck to, Star Wars will be successful. If progressive concepts are placed above that formula, then its over for Disney and they seem to understand that now, after a decade of hard lessons.

I was enjoying all the news coming out of D23 and I sort of celebrated by picking up the Lenovo Star Wars Jedi Challenges video game which converts your smart phone into an augmented reality simulator and I have to say it is extremely impressive. But you can see clearly the hit Star Wars has taken to their brand. The unit just a year ago was being sold at Target for $200 and I picked it up this week for less than $50. I figured that for that much money I could take a risk and buy the Disney product and I’m glad I did. But considering what they had done to the legacy fans with the books and previous comics and other merchandise then gave those same fans a mess of a movie in The Force Awakens, which essentially killed all the old white guys and put progressive diversity in charge only to lose over and over again to a very inept First Order, not even I would pay that much money for a new Star Wars game. That’s unfortunate, because the game itself is just amazing, a real technical marvel and exhibition of mythology pushed to its absolute limits. Big ideas, big fun, and a major advancement of the story telling experience.

The lesson here is that progressive, or even liberal ideas cannot fill up that bowl of thought, and people won’t just accept those concepts because they like Star Wars. They like Star Wars because it represents values that most people share, small government, independence, and you gotta have guns. The anti-gun policies and hippie like love your neighbor stuff doesn’t go well with a franchise that is all about war and why wars happen. When you can’t even where a gun on your hip in cosplay to the new Star Wars land in Florida because everyone is crazy over weapons and terrorism, Disney has to understand that you can’t tell a story about peace, love, and trusting the government without weapons, and expect people to spend millions of dollars of their hard earned money on it, just so they can eat colored popcorn and drink blue milk. Star Wars is about fighting for independence, especially personal independence. In all Star Wars stories that are good are examples of institutional failure, even among the Jedi Council, and that is the heart of the entire franchise. Unfortunately, Disney was a part of that institutional thinking and it took them a long time to come close to figuring out the problem. I just hope its not too late. It would be a shame if it is.

Rich Hoffman

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